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Post by elliott on Feb 2, 2023 17:42:50 GMT -5
Oh yeah that's Parv. He used to run or might still run an insane alt-right youtube channel. Fuck that guy.
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Post by Cap on Feb 2, 2023 20:54:29 GMT -5
oh yeah, fuck that noise. Didn't realize.
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Post by club on Feb 3, 2023 12:23:59 GMT -5
Elliott's point about where the cannon came from is a good one, but even if the seeds were planted by a hand full of hardcore super dorks [said affectionately] it caught on with folks, spread, and for better or worse became influential in circles. That isn't me saying it shouldn't be challenged (it should) or that we have to hold it up on some pedestal (we don't). But shaking that influence - like the impact of most or all influential figures or cannons - is a lot easier said that done because the impact has already been made. In turn, it isn't the be all end all, but it isn't nothing either. However, Elliott pointing this out makes his particular disdain for a certain poster of GWE infamy make a bit more sense. hahaI seriously have no idea what this bolded part is referencing. Von Kramer? He's a right wing bigot. I think it's a lot easier to "shake the influence" of the canon when you realize where it came from. That's my point. These guys weren't keepers of ancient wisdom who watched everything and compared it bias free. They didn't watch Ric Flair & then queue up Buddy Rose, then the weekly Arena Mexico show and then dig into some 60s French stuff and then come to their conclusions. These were highly biased people with an extremely limited scope of footage. Who cares what they thought? We didn't have a mountain of Portland Buddy Rose footage until the early 2010s after he died. Phil didn't find the French stuff until what like 2015? 2016? It's been less than a decade and that's some of the most amazing wrestling any of us have ever seen. The further forward we go and as we continue to discover more footage from the past and new matches take place, the more obsolete whatever existing Canon becomes. Not saying people are wrong for liking the conventional wisdom great stuff. My point is that due to completely different technology & the continuing discovery of old footage we have access to more footage than any fans ever did. It's our duty to challenge the conventional wisdom because our scope is so much broader. This is a very good point. Speaking for myself, buying tapes was an investment at a time when I little in the way of disposable income. I most bought the stuff that was highly touted online because that seemed a safe bet. Side note: Thinking back, it's interesting how the discussion is always on matches now. Of course there were AJPW comps and the like but there definitely used to be more discussion about great shows - Battle Formation 96, Dream Slam, J-Cup - than there is now. But I guess this comes from the change from buying copies of tapes to streaming. |
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Post by elliott on Feb 3, 2023 14:32:36 GMT -5
I seriously have no idea what this bolded part is referencing. Von Kramer? He's a right wing bigot. I think it's a lot easier to "shake the influence" of the canon when you realize where it came from. That's my point. These guys weren't keepers of ancient wisdom who watched everything and compared it bias free. They didn't watch Ric Flair & then queue up Buddy Rose, then the weekly Arena Mexico show and then dig into some 60s French stuff and then come to their conclusions. These were highly biased people with an extremely limited scope of footage. Who cares what they thought? We didn't have a mountain of Portland Buddy Rose footage until the early 2010s after he died. Phil didn't find the French stuff until what like 2015? 2016? It's been less than a decade and that's some of the most amazing wrestling any of us have ever seen. The further forward we go and as we continue to discover more footage from the past and new matches take place, the more obsolete whatever existing Canon becomes. Not saying people are wrong for liking the conventional wisdom great stuff. My point is that due to completely different technology & the continuing discovery of old footage we have access to more footage than any fans ever did. It's our duty to challenge the conventional wisdom because our scope is so much broader.
Side note: Thinking back, it's interesting how the discussion is always on matches now. Of course there were AJPW comps and the like but there definitely used to be more discussion about great shows - Battle Formation 96, Dream Slam, J-Cup - than there is now. But I guess this comes from the change from buying copies of tapes to streaming. Exactly. Tapes were crazy expensive & the bigger your collection, the more storage issues you'd run into. Within these limitations, people were focused on getting the best of the best. That's really how "the canon" was created & perpetuated in the pre-dvd & pre-file sharing world. It was born from a lack of resources. People were much less likely to take risks on something unknown. |
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Post by KB8 on Feb 3, 2023 14:48:57 GMT -5
I hopped in on this tape-trading ridiculousness right before the transition to DVDs and I remember ordering a custom comp from Golden Boy Tapes for like £80. Even the stupid amount of DVDs I have here take up more space than I'd like and had become a pain in the ass to store a while back. To hell with a shit load of video tapes covering the same amount of footage. And the associated cost, obviously.
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Post by club on Feb 3, 2023 14:52:39 GMT -5
£80!
What was on the tape?
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Post by KB8 on Feb 3, 2023 15:30:29 GMT -5
It was one of those Best Of/custom comps (shipping was brutal when ordering from certain places as well, but I think that guy was from the UK). I think I just had a bunch of highly-touted stuff put on there - mostly the canon stuff of the time, funnily enough. A bunch of juniors stuff, All Japan, nothing particularly obscure. I don't remember how many tapes were actually included now, but there was a website that popped up not too many years after that called buythematch.com that basically put together custom comps only on DVD. It was like $1.50 per match. By that point I'd lost the fucking video tapes anyway so I just had some of those matches put on there again and I wound up with like a dozen discs worth of stuff for half the price.
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Post by elliott on Feb 3, 2023 15:43:45 GMT -5
I can believe it. Getting a custom comp was nuts and never worth it. You had to pay the premium prices because of the extra time & work that went into making a comp from scratch.
Better off buying existing comps or paying to have multiple shows put on one 8hour long tape.
Again this helps reinforce the existing canon.
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Post by KB8 on Feb 3, 2023 15:52:42 GMT -5
I'd bought one before that with a bunch of American stuff on it; mostly your Flair matches versus Steamboat/Windham/Luger, some other territory stuff like Tully/Magnum, some WWF stuff, again all pretty standard stuff for the time. That was nowhere near as expensive as it was one of those existing comps where the match list was already set.
I was way late to the party on Ditch's sites but discovering those in '05 or so sure saved me a boat load of money.
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Post by silverwidow on Feb 3, 2023 20:31:53 GMT -5
I can believe it. Getting a custom comp was nuts and never worth it. You had to pay the premium prices because of the extra time & work that went into making a comp from scratch. Better off buying existing comps or paying to have multiple shows put on one 8hour long tape. Again this helps reinforce the existing canon. Oh yeah, back in those days I was paying Lynch $25 for a 2 hour custom comp. Crazy to think about in hindsight.
DVDs were a game changer - they were 5 or 6 bucks, so I was ordering a shit load more wrestling.
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Post by andylfc on Feb 4, 2023 0:14:48 GMT -5
I hopped in on this tape-trading ridiculousness right before the transition to DVDs and I remember ordering a custom comp from Golden Boy Tapes for like £80. Even the stupid amount of DVDs I have here take up more space than I'd like and had become a pain in the ass to store a while back. To hell with a shit load of video tapes covering the same amount of footage. And the associated cost, obviously. I remember the Golden Boy Tapes website in the early 2000s. Glen Radford was the main tape trader in the UK just before the tapes were phased out and replaced with discs. Over in the UK we had a tape trader by the name of Rob Butcher who traded from 1993 to 1999. Perhaps before you hopped in KB8? A single tape cost around £8 and a 4hour custom comp including postage would be around £13(very reasonable) with a month for delivery. He would post out a list every 3 or 4 months and the majority of tapes listed would have the Meltzer match ratings with Robs own ratings and comments inked in at the side. So basically I went down the 4hour comp route and cherry picked stuff for a good 5 years before he sold the business and it went to shit a year later. That all brings back great memories for me in picking the footage for a comp, waiting weeks for it to arrive and then finally being able to watch it in crummy 3rd generation quality hahaha We moved house so many times that I eventually just binned all my tapes. Though I do have a few friends locally that still have some tapes in storage and even the old tape lists. Good times! |
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Post by club on Feb 4, 2023 5:28:19 GMT -5
I hopped in on this tape-trading ridiculousness right before the transition to DVDs and I remember ordering a custom comp from Golden Boy Tapes for like £80. Even the stupid amount of DVDs I have here take up more space than I'd like and had become a pain in the ass to store a while back. To hell with a shit load of video tapes covering the same amount of footage. And the associated cost, obviously. I remember the Golden Boy Tapes website in the early 2000s. Glen Radford was the main tape trader in the UK just before the tapes were phased out and replaced with discs. Over in the UK we had a tape trader by the name of Rob Butcher who traded from 1993 to 1999. Perhaps before you hopped in KB8? A single tape cost around £8 and a 4hour custom comp including postage would be around £13(very reasonable) with a month for delivery. He would post out a list every 3 or 4 months and the majority of tapes listed would have the Meltzer match ratings with Robs own ratings and comments inked in at the side. So basically I went down the 4hour comp route and cherry picked stuff for a good 5 years before he sold the business and it went to shit a year later. That all brings back great memories for me in picking the footage for a comp, waiting weeks for it to arrive and then finally being able to watch it in crummy 3rd generation quality hahaha We moved house so many times that I eventually just binned all my tapes. Though I do have a few friends locally that still have some tapes in storage and even the old tape lists. Good times! Golden Boy still owe me a free VHS tape from a competition I won at puroresufan back in 2002! I remember getting into buying tapes in the UK from Mark Rentcombe in the early 00s, and under the counter dealings in a wrestling shop in Manchester. Then used a guy called Pick from UKFF. From what I remember he quit selling tapes to become IWA Mid-South's 'official' UK distributor tapes. I imagine this did not end well. Also, getting mail-order copies of the Observer via a cheque payable to MOONSAULT. So mysterious! There was a certain romance to all of this, and was fine for following big shows for say CZW or NOAH. In terms of getting the anything remotely like the overview of wrestling that's available to us now, it was nigh on impossible. Cost, availability of footage, video quality, context. No way. That was for the Dave Meltzers of the world. |
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Post by KB8 on Feb 4, 2023 8:46:53 GMT -5
I hopped in on this tape-trading ridiculousness right before the transition to DVDs and I remember ordering a custom comp from Golden Boy Tapes for like £80. Even the stupid amount of DVDs I have here take up more space than I'd like and had become a pain in the ass to store a while back. To hell with a shit load of video tapes covering the same amount of footage. And the associated cost, obviously. I remember the Golden Boy Tapes website in the early 2000s. Glen Radford was the main tape trader in the UK just before the tapes were phased out and replaced with discs. Over in the UK we had a tape trader by the name of Rob Butcher who traded from 1993 to 1999. Perhaps before you hopped in KB8? A single tape cost around £8 and a 4hour custom comp including postage would be around £13(very reasonable) with a month for delivery. He would post out a list every 3 or 4 months and the majority of tapes listed would have the Meltzer match ratings with Robs own ratings and comments inked in at the side. So basically I went down the 4hour comp route and cherry picked stuff for a good 5 years before he sold the business and it went to shit a year later. That all brings back great memories for me in picking the footage for a comp, waiting weeks for it to arrive and then finally being able to watch it in crummy 3rd generation quality hahaha We moved house so many times that I eventually just binned all my tapes. Though I do have a few friends locally that still have some tapes in storage and even the old tape lists. Good times! I jumped into buying footage in the early 00s, probably right around the time we discovered the internet up in Scotland, so Rob Butcher was before my time. I think by the time I started buying tapes the people selling them were maybe trying to wring as much money out of them as possible before the switch to DVDs (which arrived before I spent TOO much, thankfully). The extra costs did not circumvent the 4-5 weeks shipping, however. |
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Post by Cap on Feb 4, 2023 9:51:32 GMT -5
I also jumped into buying footage in the early 2000s. I definitely had some stuff from golden boy tapes. I mostly did comps and only a hand full of custom ones. I lost it all in an apartment fire in 07, so I had to rebuild my set and didn't really amp up my collecting again until way later, probably 14. That experience of losing all my footage made me over-thorough in collecting good wrestling. I still like to have DVDs. I don't have nearly as many as some, but lots of commercial release comps and a hand full of the big multi disk sets such as the famed 80s sets. I even have my entire google drive of matches backed up on a hard drive. It is overkill. It's like hoarding a made up currency like schrute bucks.
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Post by KB8 on Feb 4, 2023 12:12:18 GMT -5
I still like to have the physical DVDs as well, even though I haven't really bought any in a few years now. I wound up getting rid of a buuuunch of separate shows and stuff not too long ago from when I was buying that kind of thing regularly back in the 00s. I expect I'll move house at some point in the next year or two for work, and I have a big storage case thing that just about holds everything right now (honestly it's about 90% comps that goodhelmet has put together over the years), but taking anything more with me feels like it might not be feasible. I mostly watch stuff on my laptop now anyway so a hard drive or google drive is more convenient.
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